They’re down to the finishing touches.

The University Way revitalization project that began in August 2002 is mostly finished. What remains is an effort to spruce up the intersection of University Way, or the Ave, and Campus Parkway.

The Campus Parkway median has long been a sore subject among those interested in maintaining a beautiful campus. A patch of lawn that routinely turned brown in the dry Seattle summers and a collection of overhead wires never proved to be the inviting front doorstep to campus that 91̽��officials longed for. That’s about to change, according to Bill Talley, the University’s longtime campus landscape architect.

“We’re going to create a place of celebration right outside our campus,” he said. 

This artist’s drawing indicates how the Campus Parkway median might look when the project is completed during spring quarter.

By the end of the spring quarter there will be a grove of medium-sized flowering trees planted on either side of the median. Down the middle of the space will run a sidewalk that branches into two walkways enveloping an area that will be used as a sort of showcase for the arts.

“That space could be used for traveling exhibits, it could be an adjunct to the Henry Gallery, we just don’t know for sure yet,” Talley said.

What we do know is students will take a lead role in designing the space. About 30 students from the Program on Public Art will lead the effort to spruce up the retaining walls and the walkways that surround the display space in the middle of the median. It will be an invaluable learning experience for students in the program, according to John Young, a School of Art professor and one of the instructors for the interdisciplinary program.

“The whole idea is to run students through the entire professional process, which is giving voice to a community,” Young said.

Students will hear input from the community, then will come up with a design. They’ll have to get approval from the community and complete construction within an 11-week period.

On either end of the median will be flower beds with space for both perennials and annuals.

And the median west of the Ave will be less formal, with an array of trees much like the space further west toward the University Bridge.

The project, Talley said, has been successful because of strong partnerships with the University, the U-District community and the city. Longtime neighborhood activist Patty Whisler played a key role, as did the city’s Department of Neighborhoods, according to Talley. The interested parties held three design charettes where there was surprisingly little dissent.

Improving the median has been a part of the 91̽��master plan for several years, but funding the effort has always been a problem. Participants in the charettes explored the idea of scaling down the scope of the project. That decision proved to be crucial in jump-starting the effort that’s about to come to fruition.

“We finally realized that we better take this just as it is,” Talley said. “So we’re not going to move any curbs, we’re not going to reroute traffic, we’re not going to change much because there’s no money for that kind of stuff. So we started talking about how we could make it work within what it already was.”

The result was a relatively modest price tag of $300,000, most of which will be picked up by the city. The 91̽��will pay for trees and will continue to maintain the city property as it has done for the last 50 years.

For too long the school bully has been considered an unavoidable reality, according to one 91̽��researcher.

Karin Frey, a research associate professor in the College of Education, says two programs are already in place and helping reduce the incidents of aggression and bullying in schools around the country. Frey will talk about Second Step and Steps to Respect — programs run by the Seattle-based nonprofit Committee for Children — during the college’s upcoming forum, “Safe Passage: Helping Kids Face Tough Challenges.”

The forum is set for Tuesday, Feb. 10 from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. in the Walker Ames Room, Kane Hall. Frey will be joined at the event by College of Education colleagues Diane Carlson Jones, Susan Nolen and Scott Stage.

Frey says the key to the Steps to Respect program is its thorough approach to dealing with bullying.

“It’s one thing to convince kids to report bullying,” Frey said. “It’s another thing to get adults to deal with bullying effectively.”

Steps to Respect trains adults to identify bullying and give them teaching methods that help prevent bullying from happening in the first place. But the programs also stress that the problem must be dealt with school-wide. There must be clear policies and a system that supports those policies.

When all that is in place, Frey says, it usually leads to less harassment.

“The kids reported less victimization on a survey,” she said. “We observed less bullying and that’s encouraging. Also, we observed less argumentative behavior. That’s important to us because there’s a classroom component that teaches basic social and friendship skills. There’s some evidence that kids who have friends are bullied less. And if they are bullied then they are less likely to suffer emotional stress.”

The classroom curriculum covers empathy, or the ability to identify with others; emotional regulation, or the ability to recognize and effectively express one’s own emotions; basic conflict resolution skills; and assertiveness skills. But at least as important, she says, is convincing adults of the severity of the problem.

“Adults have very little understanding of the amount of bullying that goes on,” she said. “It’s grossly underestimated. Students by and large don’t report it because they believe adults won’t intervene or won’t intervene effectively.”

Young people fear that adult inaction or ineffective action can have the wrong effect, leading to increased bullying. The result is a code of silence that on the surface seems baffling to adults. Other adults, Frey says, think of bullying as a kind of ritual that toughens up young people — a notion she vehemently disagrees with.

“For some adults it makes sense that dealing with bullying is just a part of growing up,” she said. “But it’s hard to imagine what it would be like on the job if I were afraid to go to the bathroom, or if when I went into the lunchroom people sort of moved around so I couldn’t sit down, or if they shoved me so my food went all over the place. If that were a daily event in anyone’s life, adults, too, would be miserable. They would start to show problems with self-esteem, aggression and maybe depression.”

Organizers ask that those who plan to attend the event RSVP at , by calling 206-543-1035 or by e-mail at edudev@u.washington.edu.

One thing you won’t see a lot of in Bob Underwood’s photography portfolio is people, at least not in any recognizable form.

Underwood says one can see images reminiscent of nature in almost all of his photos, whether they’re from the macro-world or the micro-world. This is an image of human flesh magnified about 5,000 times.

Underwood is a master of the big and the small, the micro and the macro. The only photos he takes of people are at the cellular level. He captures morphological images for the UW’s Division of Dermatology. And on the other end of the spectrum, he shoots landscapes, images in black and white of wide open spaces, conjuring the works of Ansel Adams.

“I have a perpetual need for balance,” the soft spoken Underwood says to explain his broad photographic repertoire. Indeed, even the technology he uses ranges from antiquated on the one hand to cutting edge on the other.

The images he captures at the 91̽��are helpful for scientists searching for ways to compare diseased or damaged cells with healthy ones. But one can’t look at the images without seeing much more. The vibrant colors and the abstract images are nothing and at the same time could be almost anything.

“I’ve been doing it for 19 years and I like it,” he says. “It doesn’t get tiring. Physically, sometimes, I get tired. But it’s not emotionally tiring. I get sort of philosophical about it. I get to look into a world that other people can’t see.”

That could soon change. Underwood is so taken by the colorful images that he’s decided to publish a children’s book using scenes from the molecular world. The writing has been completed. The next step, he says, is to find someone to publish the book, which has a working title of There’s No One I’d Rather Be Than Me.

Underwood is also considering ways to get his macroscopic landscapes into the public sphere. He’s shown the work before, but never with much success.

“Anytime I entertain the idea of making money or trying to find a market for my work, it just screws everything up,” he says.

For example, there was the time he decided to show some of his work in a local gallery. Two pieces sold, but before Underwood collected a paycheck the gallery owner had closed shop and hightailed it out of town.

“I thought that was a message.”

The message was reinforced when on another occasion his work was stolen right off the wall. Still, he thinks it might be of value to share the images with the public, even if there’s no money involved.

“It doesn’t interest me to market my things, but I am toying with the idea of having some shows, just for the sake of showing the work, not to make money.”

The tools he uses are as diverse as the images they help him collect. To capture the minute inner-workings of the human body he uses a powerful microscope that can magnify things up to 100,000 times their original size. The scope works in connection with a high-end computer. To capture the landscapes, on the other hand, Underwood uses antique, large-format cameras, three of which he’s rebuilt himself.

His interest in the cameras goes back to some of his earliest days exploring photography. After enrolling in Everett Community College’s program and visiting area galleries he developed an eye for a specific kind of photograph.

“I got really hooked on these images that you could almost walk into. They had so much detail. You could see every leaf and every little vein on every leaf. On a pine tree you could see every needle. I got curious as to how they could do that.”

The answer was to use large-format cameras. He first went up to a 2¼-inch square format, then to 2¼ by 3¼, then to 4 by 5 and finally he rebuilt a camera that shot onto a 5-by-7 inch plate. One of the cameras he uses was built in 1872. But the age of the equipment, he’s found, doesn’t matter. The size of the image plate is the key factor, with larger plates producing more detailed images.

“If you take a 35mm image of a leaf, you might have five levels of gray to describe the topography or texture. But if you do it with a 4-by-5 inch view camera you get these really subtle and smooth gray values. It almost comes to life. And since you’re able to develop each image separately you can completely control the contrast.”

All in all, he says, it’s much more precise and contemplative than the standard process most photographers use today.

And while the technical differences between shooting at work and shooting the landscapes are significant, Underwood sees a great deal of similarity in the final products.

“The overall philosophy I have toward images is to look for metaphors in natural forms. Our eyes try to make up landscapes when looking through the microscope. We know things about our existence and we tend to see natural forms like sunsets and we attach our feelings to that. So part of looking at landscapes, whether they’re in the microscopic world or the macroscopic world, is looking at metaphors that enhance our understanding of our existence.”

On a campus known for its majestic scenery and verdant grounds the “Pink Beauty” crab apple near the Department of Communication building has been a longtime favorite — maybe too long.

The tree, which sits near the bus stop between Communication and Stevens Way, is scheduled for removal on Jan. 24. And while admirers of the tree lament its forthcoming demise, the UW’s campus landscape architect says the removal is probably overdue.

“It’s a hazard,” said Bill Talley, who has been the driving force behind the overall landscape of the 91̽��campus for most of the last 20 years.

Talley points to some of the branches that have literally no bark remaining, then he notes the excessive fungi growth near the tree’s roots, which leads him to a painful conclusion: “that tree is rotted beyond belief.”

Talley and others say it’s unsafe to keep the tree in the ground any longer. If it came down unexpectedly it could be hazardous in such a high traffic area.

“It should have been removed a long time ago,” he said. “It’s probably been around five years longer than it should have been, but that’s because everyone loves it so much.”

And for good reason. When in bloom, usually for about three weeks during the month of May, the tree is among the most spectacular sites on campus.

“The blooms are remarkable because they are so plentiful,” said Nora Strothman, the 91̽��gardener who has cared for the tree for the last 12 years. “It’s an almost magenta pink, and there’s so many of them that you can’t see through the tree. It’s a solid mass. You come around the corner and see this huge pink statement that takes your breath away.”

At least that’s how it used to be. During the last several seasons the bright pink blossoms have been less plentiful and less colorful, leading Strothman to agree with Talley’s assessment. In fact, she says anyone who has watched the tree during the last several seasons has probably noticed the decline.

“This doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone, but people are so attached that it is a really sad event,” she said. “It breaks our heart. As gardeners we do everything we can to maintain trees. This is the saddest thing we have to do — remove something as beloved as this tree.”

According to the Brockman Memorial Tree Tour, www.washington.edu/home/treetour, the tree is the only known “Pink Beauty” in Seattle. This adds to the sense of urgency campus officials feel in preserving the tree. While tree No. 34 on the tour will come down, 25 scions are already in pots and will be planted on campus as they mature.

Another crab apple will be planted in place of the current one, which was received by the arboretum in 1948 then moved to campus during the 520-freeway project. A lifespan of 55 years or so, Talley says, is not uncommon for a crab apple.

“Crabs tend to get diseased,” he said. “So a 55-year lifespan is not bad. I know people can’t stand the thought of it, but the tree is really past its prime.”

Strothman is philosophical about the future. She hates to see the tree go, but knows that it’s just part of the natural cycle.

“When you’re a gardener, you do things for the present, but you also invest in the future,” she said. “So the tree we replace that crab with will, in our lifetime probably never mature to what we’ve enjoyed from this tree. But for many years we’ve enjoyed the gifts of someone else’s labor. Now it’s up to us to do something that future generations will enjoy.”

At least one group at the 91̽��has found a way to successfully expand services even during these tight budgetary times.

For one year now Training and Development has been offering hundreds of courses via the Internet. Users pay a flat fee of $120 and for one year they can access any of the courses at any time from any computer with an Internet connection.

The e-Learning program was considered something of a risk when it was launched in December 2002, but the result has been a huge success.

“This is a relatively new concept, particularly on the 91̽��campus,” said Beth Warrick, the director of T&D. “E-learning has been used in businesses for more than five years. It’s had mixed success there. And when we started talking about e-Learning a lot of people were very concerned that the instructor-led courses were going to go away.”

That’s not the case at all. In fact, few instructor-led courses have been eliminated. But that initial fear among their clients on campus, Warrick says, had staff at T&D worried that, without some careful planning, e-Learning might flop.

The group did some intensive research, picked a business partner that had a history of success, educated customers on campus, and then forged ahead hoping to break even by attracting 500 subscribers in the first year. By March, just more than three months into the project, they had met that goal. At the end of one year, they’ve more than doubled it. In short, e-Learning has caught on with the speed of a super computer.

Courses for the program were developed by the SkillSoft Corporation and cover a range of professional skills, such as management, leadership, communication, finance and marketing. There are also courses designed to help individuals advance their own career goals as well as courses on personal development, like how to keep a healthy balance between work and family.

Within the curriculum there are a variety of educational approaches that appeal to different learning styles and needs. Say, for example, an employee needs to perform a task that’s not typically part of her job. She could spend a couple hours taking an entire course on successful presentations, for example, or she could browse through certain portions of the course in a few minutes. She could also just print out some of the reference material that goes along with the course. The software can even be downloaded for use on a computer that isn’t connected to the Web.

But the net effect is that employees who want to learn new skills have more options than they did a year ago, and the cost to the University was literally almost nothing.

“At this time last year we were just offering instructor-led training,” said Jamie Wilson. “Now we’re offering that plus e-Learning and linked learning. We’ve actually expanded our offerings — more courses and more formats.”

The linked learning option combines two instructor-led classroom meetings — one at the beginning and one at the end — with an e-Learning course. That format has been particularly successful and may be an area for future growth, according to Warrick.

T&D staffers are thrilled with the results so far and expect more and more people will start to use the program. But no one is planning to abandon the classroom learning anytime soon. For one thing, there’s no software available for the T&D instruction that is specific to the UW. And during the research phase, Warrick says, they determined that the most successful e-learning programs were paired with classroom learning and the support of a real-live person.

“Everybody has different learning styles,” Wilson said. “Some people love getting on the computer and learning things, some people still want to come into the classroom to learn. There’s always going to be those people who prefer an instructor-led course.”

But at the same time, Warrick says e-Learning has brought T&D’s services to a whole new segment of the campus population.

“I have a hunch that we have people who have signed up for e-Learning who would never ever take any other on-campus training; they might have to introduce themselves, they might have to do an icebreaker, or they just don’t have the time. I think a significant number of those people have signed up for e-Learning. It provides a way for them to improve themselves, but in a safe and self-paced environment.

“And it gives them exactly what they need. They don’t have to sit through a 12-hour communications class when all they really wanted was the last two hours. They can learn what they need to learn when they need to learn it.”

Warrick said the e-Learning classes are available to all employees. Those without regular computer access can use a lab available at the T&D offices in the Brooklyn Building or any other lab on campus.

For more information about e-Learning and other T&D programs, visit them online at .

For the first time since 1991 the Huskies are No. 1.

The Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps, Detachment 910 received the Right of Line award recently. The award is given annually by national headquarters to the top corps from among 145 ROTC programs around the country. The 91̽��corps has frequently been a finalist for the award, but this is just the second time it has claimed top honors. The announcement has everyone in “Det 910” in a good mood, according to their leader.

“It’s been a very fun couple of weeks,” said Col. Rob Coe. “The award traditionally goes to some of the really big schools like The Citadel, Virginia Military Institute and some of the big schools down in the Southeast.”

But Coe and others from the 91̽��detachment received a strong foreshadowing of the honor in March. During a unit compliance inspection — an evaluation process that each detachment goes through every three years — the UW’s Det 910 received an outstanding rating. It was the only detachment in the nation to receive the highest possible score on that inspection.

A top division of the Air Force conducts those inspections and looks at everything from record keeping to the number and quality of cadets produced by the program. The 91̽��graduated 47 cadets last year, the fourth-highest total nationally. And many of those graduates were high achievers, including one who went on to Harvard Law School and another who earned a full-ride scholarship to medical school.

“You don’t win an award like this without good cadets and we have some very good ones here,” Coe said.

He also cited the support of the 91̽��and the surrounding Seattle community as big factors in the detachment’s success. The Provost’s Office and Student Fiscal Services in particular, Coe said, have provided services that separate Det 910 from other groups around the country.

“We’re also fortunate to be in Seattle where there’s a lot of things happening in the high-tech industry,” he said. Coe said the cadets are able to tour Boeing, for example.

Coe said the detachment is enjoying the award, but also recognizes the increased pressure that goes with that success.

“Now more than ever we feel like we have to live up to this on a daily basis. We try for perfection all the time.”

U-Match is probably not the place to find the next love of your life, nor is it some corporate moneymaking scheme. But if love and/or money happen, so be it, according to the duo that gave life to the increasingly popular Web community last spring.

U-Match was the brainchild of two 91̽��students. They launched the interactive Web community with the hope that it would add something to the college experience, that it would help them in their classes and introduce them to folks they might otherwise never get a chance to know. Their plan has worked despite one or two small complications.

“One problem we’ve come across is that a lot of people think it is a dating service, which it is not,” said David Brown, the former student and now 91̽��admissions counselor who got the service rolling. The other problem is that many people think Brown and his U-Match partner, Jonah Ellison, are in it for the money. Not true, at least not yet anyway. For the moment U-Match is simply a University-sanctioned student club.

“Student clubs are supposed to be there to benefit the students and kind of enhance their college experience. That’s what U-Match does,” Brown said. And in just a few months it has made some impressive strides.

The Web community boasts more than 1,400 active users. Students at both Western Washington University and Washington State University have contacted the duo, expressing interest in developing similar groups on their campuses. The broad interest in the Web community has the two hoping for a profitable future, even though there’s no money in it for them currently.

The system relies on the willingness of students to interact with their classmates on the Web. U-Match students plug their class schedule into a database and voila, instant social network, study group, etc.

“There have been people sharing ideas about their classes,” he said. “It has enhanced learning to where it’s not just happening in the classroom. Now it’s happening on U-Match too.”

People share lecture notes, advice and encouragement about their classes. They plan study groups and review their struggles and failures on previous assignments and tests. They can sell their textbooks. And, believe it or not, every so often the students look up from the grindstone long enough to post a bit of humor.

But all joking aside, Brown believes there’s a clear need for community building at an institution the size of the UW. As an admissions counselor, Brown is often asked by prospective students how they can fit in at such a large university.

“Sometimes you enter the 91̽�� and, even though there are great programs like the FIG and now the new CLUE and you have the different housing options, there are still limits to the number of people you can meet. Well this is just another resource to meet people and to form study groups and friendships.”

Brown got the idea for creating U-Match while participating in another Web community. A group from the 91̽��started posting thoughts about their classes and forming study groups. Then Brown decided a service dedicated to nothing but academics and student life on campus might be useful. Ellison jumped on the idea immediately.

“I sat down and coded it out,” he said. “I did it in one night. It took about nine hours.”

All that before he’d even met Brown, his partner in the project. Ellison said it just seemed like a great way to meet people, fellow 91̽��students in particular. He also relished the programming challenge in such a public sphere.

“I liked doing the programming and the Web design. It was a way to learn and to test my knowledge,” said the senior psychology/communications major. “On this project I learned a lot about databases and Web script programming. Plus it was something that was beneficial for other people. Other times I’ll do some programming and people won’t know about it. I knew a lot of people would benefit from this.”

Visit the site and learn more about the Web community at .

It’s as if Michael Stern listened to some of his own advice.

The singer-songwriter, who also works as a family nurse practitioner and research clinician at Hall Health, included five songs written by other artists on his latest release, Dance. That’s a new approach for the veteran folk singer whose five previous compact discs included almost exclusively his own original songs. Stern and his fans will celebrate the release of the CD during a 12:30 p.m. performance on Sunday, Nov. 16 at University Baptist Church, 4554 12th Ave. N.E.

“Maybe I was trying to prove something,” Stern said about his prior inclination to record only his own material.

“In some ways the title track, Dance, talks about that. Just be yourself. Who cares? ‘Dance as if no one was watching and sing as if no one could hear.’ So maybe that’s why I’m just wanting to record what feels right and sounds good. It’s about letting go.”

And it continues to be about a range of social issues too. Stern is known for having an activist, peace-loving bent to his music. But he’s beginning to think it might be more accurate to describe his music as an extension of his work at Hall Health. In both cases he’s simply trying to heal people.

That’s a theme Stern has been considering ever since a trip he took several years ago to Africa where he did some volunteer work for Habitat for Humanity. During that trip, he met with an African storyteller/healer who said he and others like him had been using music to help heal their patients for generations.

“They had clients come into their home who might have health problems or emotional or relational problems,” he said. “The storyteller/healer would play the mbira until they all went into a trance. That was their therapy. Then, at the end of the session, they felt improved or healed or that their issues had been addressed. I found that a kind of intriguing parallel to what I was thinking about with my music.”

Stern won’t be bringing African musical instruments to his office anytime soon. But fans of his music know that themes of healing have always been a part of Stern’s work. Sometimes the message is directed at individuals, sometimes at government leaders and sometimes at society at large. In addition to Dance, each of these songs from the new CD has a little something to do with healing:

• Take Only What You Can Carry is a haunting and timely look back at the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. The song’s relevance today is clear as the debate between civil liberties and a nation’s safety and security rages on with unmistakable racial, or racist, undertones.
  
• Any Fool is a reference to a famous quote by John Muir, the father of our national parks system. But instead of only making an environmental statement, Stern added to the message to deliver a powerful critique of war and retaliation.

“Any fool can declare war before he knows what we’re fighting for. Any fool can retaliate without knowing who it is that they hate. These are the fools who often say what a shame that the innocent got in the way. The same ones who claim to have seen the light and are sure what they’re doing is right.”

• Providence is a song that Stern says he’s particularly proud of. It embraces individual differences, sexual orientation specifically.

The thoughtful, left-leaning themes are nothing new for Stern. His signature songs are straight out of the tradition that shaped him in his youth. He was a fan of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez when he first started writing music in the late 1960s and 70s.

He’s perhaps best known for the songs Stand Up, inspired by the famous quote by Nazi concentration camp survivor Martin Niemoller, and Fight No More Forever, inspired by the concessionary speech of Nez Pearce leader Chief Joseph.

But Stern insists there’s more than weighty issues involved in his music. In fact, the tune Waltzing Around in the Nude, one of the cover songs on the new release, is quickly becoming a favorite at live performances.

“Laughter at my concerts is definitely allowed and perfectly legal,” Stern said.

That, like the cover songs, is a relatively new twist. Stern says he realized somewhere along the line that you can’t drop too many heavy messages on an audience without also providing some comic relief. Perhaps that’s just another sign of his letting go, his evolution as an artist. If so, it could be a sign that Stern’s music career — a career that he says will continue until the day he dies — is just getting ready to take off.

“I think among great artists, painters, musicians, composers, speech writers, even athletes, the greatest ones talk about the letting go being the point at which their greatest work occurs. In other words, there’s no substitute for discipline and practice and all the stuff that makes someone technically great. But it’s those who manage at the peak of their preparation to release themselves to just fly.

“From a creative point of view that’s more what I’ve been experiencing as I write songs. Practice, yes. Discipline, yes. But then at the point of a performance or the point of creative experience, you have to let go. There’s no technical skill that can match creative release.”

“You are a dangerous young man.”

Those words, spoken, according to Shawn Brixey, in a thick British accent, abruptly ended a meeting 15 years ago between him and the president of a well-respected museum and art school. The president had been considering commissioning Brixey to create a novel installation. But about two-thirds of the way through their discussion, the campus leader had heard enough. He pounded his fist on the table while shouting the “dangerous” accusation. Brixey, now a 91̽��associate professor, was quickly ushered out of the room.

Times have changed for experimental media artists, or as Brixey calls them, “meta-disciplinarians.” Once considered too controversial and difficult, these scholars who employ innovative science to create groundbreaking art are increasingly finding a place on campus, especially here at the UW, where the Board of Regents recently approved a doctoral program in Digital Arts and Experimental Media.

That move, according to Brixey, the associate director of the Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media, could prove monumental.

“I don’t think the administration and the regents realize the history they’ve made,” he said from the center’s temporary home in the basement of Thomson Hall. A permanent suite of offices for the center, also known as DXARTS, is under construction at Raitt Hall. “They’ve allowed us to migrate out of our traditions in studio art, computer music, etc. and let us create our own tradition. They’ve set us apart, not made us any better, but they’ve also not made us any different. They’ve offered us an equal playing field. They’ve given us a place to pursue our scholarship at the level of academic intensity and with the type of critical analysis that we require.”

And that combination is unique, according to the director of DXARTS, Richard Karpen. Typically, Karpen said, digital artists’ terminal degree is the master of fine arts. A doctorate in art-making, he said, is viewed with suspicion. But this doctoral program, Karpen argues, is anything but suspicious. To him, it simply makes sense.

“I put this equation to my colleagues in the arts,” he said. “In physics, for example, a student will spend maybe five or six years after their bachelor’s degree working on a Ph.D. before they become a professor. They may even spend one or two years on a post-doc. They may spend as many as eight years after their bachelor’s degree before they’re finished with their formal education and their mentoring process.

“In the fine arts it’s two years. So I just say, what’s wrong with this equation? Either art takes a lot shorter time to master than other disciplines — and as an artist I reject that idea because I know how difficult it is — or we’re just not training our artists as well as we could be.”

Karpen is familiar with his detractors. Many are artists who argue that expression shouldn’t be over-taught and therefore there’s little point in having a doctoral degree. Artists don’t do real research so much as express themselves, the argument goes. But Brixey and Karpen argue just the opposite.

“An artist can do research because art is not just expressing oneself,” Brixey said. “Art is expressing oneself based on knowledge.”

And if the artist’s contribution to society is of similar value to that of the scientist, which the duo believes it is, then, they argue, the educational process needs to be equally rigorous.

There are other doctoral programs in digital arts, according to Karpen. Even more are on the way. But none of the existing programs is quite like the one at the UW. DXARTS is the only effort to formally bring together artists and scientists — the center includes faculty from music, art, architecture, computer science, electrical engineering, physics and more — in one autonomous degree-granting arts program. The program will have provisional status pending review by the Graduate School in the 2006-07 academic year.

Karpen and Brixey have confidence that DXARTS will grow and blossom and become a fixture on campus. In fact, they expect it to be a national model for similar programs. And as a national model, they know they’ll have to have talented and innovative students populate the program.

“The idea is that our students will be creating art and technology that hasn’t been created or experienced before and hopefully they’ll be doing that at the same level that scientists and any other scholar produces new knowledge,” Karpen said.

Brixey’s work serves as a good example of what people can expect from DXARTS. He has a bachelor’s of fine arts from the Kansas City Art Institute and a master’s of science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he studied at the Media Laboratory.

That dual background is apparent in much of his artwork. For example, he’s currently working on a piece that uses the phenomenon of sonoluminescence — the emission of light via sound waves in a liquid. Sonoluminescence has been a scientific mystery for almost 70 years. No one can explain exactly how the process works.

Brixey’s artwork will produce the phenomenon in a unique way — via e-mail traffic that is converted from text to speech through a synthesizer. The resulting soundwaves of spoken word will create the tiny star-like light source that no one can explain. In effect, Brixey’s piece will use e-mail to create a tiny star within a glass cylinder. So what’s the point? Where’s the art? That’s a good question, according to the artist.

“What’s important to understand is that when most digital artists talk about their work, they’re referring to screen-based simulations,” he said. The difference between those pieces of art and this one is “these are real events. These are real things that are measurable. They’re not a picture of the thing we’re talking about. They’re the thing itself.

“So artists, by and large, for the last few millennia, have only had tools that allow us to make objects or images that represent the interpretation of our imagination. But it’s not the thing itself.”

Not until now, anyway. Brixey received a prestigious 2003 Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship for this new work, which he expects to finish sometime in late 2004. It will also be viewable on the Web from the DXARTS Web site, .

The artwork, Eon, will be one of the first pieces produced by someone in the new DXARTS. But Karpen and Brixey are quick to point out that it’s only a beginning. They talk with enthusiasm about the several queries they get every day in regard to the new doctoral program. The queries come from other “meta-disciplinarians” like Brixey and Karpen.

“Some of them already have graduate degrees in engineering and most also have substantial arts backgrounds,” Karpen said. “They want to come to our program.”

And when these experimental media artists start signing up for doctoral classes next fall, Brixey expects it might feel a little like a homecoming. He used to run into such students while directing the Digital Media Program at the University of California, Berkeley.

“Once you got them in class and started talking to them you’d realize they were seven-year BA students because they took two years in dance, three years in rhetoric, one year in business, a year in computer science, etc. It’s not because they don’t know what they’re doing. It’s just the compartmentalization of the university is defined in such a way that you have to specialize versus being this meta-disciplinary poet, scholar, engineer hybrid that is starting to be seen on many campuses.”

But, now, thanks in part to the UW, that’s starting to change.

It’s been a long journey toward this academic independence, but maybe Brixey should have seen it coming several years ago. It was almost one year exactly after his brush with the surly art school president that the phone rang and the administrator was professing a dramatic change of heart. The man was calling back wondering if Brixey would do the museum installation after all.

“He was on the phone saying, ‘The world has seen dramatic changes in the last year. We’d love to invite you back to do a piece.’ I guess this kind of work can be polarizing until you genuinely understand it, then it’s thumbs-up all the way.”

High-stakes tests are having the wrong effect on many of the K-12 students who need the most help, according to two scholars in Washington state.

Sheila Valencia, a professor in the UW’s College of Education, and Marsha Riddle Buly, an assistant professor at Western Washington University, looked closely at students who failed Washington state’s fourth-grade reading assessment and found that students failed the test for a wide range of reasons.

Some failures, they say, raise questions about the test itself, but the problem they identified isn’t with tests. The problem, Valencia says, comes when school districts address failures on standardized tests with an equally standardized instructional approach.

“People are trying to put into place instructional programs that they think will help low-achieving kids,” Valencia said. “They’re making the assumption that all kids who failed to meet a standard need the same kind of instruction — if you fail, you should get this kind of program. We think that’s problematic.”

Riddle Buly, who recently earned her doctorate at the UW, and Valencia found that the low test scores masked more complex problems having to do with word identification (reading the words), fluency (reading quickly, accurately and with expression) and meaning (understanding words and longer reading selections). Treating all students who fail a test the same, as is happening in some school districts across the nation in response to failures on standardized tests, misses the individual instructional needs of students.

“The short answer is, they don’t all fail for the same reasons,” Valencia said.

For example, some of the students they examined displayed the word-identification skills of a ninth-grader, yet they couldn’t pass the fourth-grade reading assessment. A uniform approach, intended to help these students reach the standard, might emphasize word identification and wouldn’t help these students. Instead, they would need instruction focusing on meaning.

Standardized tests and state tests, the researchers say, simply can’t take into account important differences among students. Students whose primary language is something other than English, for example, might have a grasp of basic vocabulary, but they haven’t necessarily developed the deeper understandings necessary to thrive in an academic subject.

The best approach, Riddle Buly and Valencia say, is to rely on a teacher who understands the strengths and needs of each student.

“A knowledgeable teacher is invaluable,” Riddle Buly said. “This study provides further evidence that a knowledgeable teacher is the most powerful way to improve learning for each student.”

But the duo doesn’t want to eliminate tests as one part of accountability. In fact, they say the tests can be valuable tools when the purpose is understood and when they’re used as part of a thorough educational plan. “Any standardized test, or any assessment, provides one snapshot of a student. To know the student we must have multiple snapshots, acquired through multiple forms of assessment, primarily the assessment that thoughtful and knowledgeable teachers do in the classroom on a regular basis,” Riddle Buly said.

Valencia agreed. “I think the tests help us do a first layer of assessment, but too often we stop at the first layer,” she said. “What would be more informative is to ask questions instead of drawing conclusions. I’d suggest asking what do we know about these children who failed and what do we know about their reading skills. Basically, we should use their failure as an opportunity to dig beneath the scores rather than looking at the scores and saying, ‘All right, here’s our plan of action.’ ”

The research, which served as the basis for Riddle Buly’s dissertation, was published last fall in the journal, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis. A copy of the article is available online at .